Recently, at the US-China summit in Beijing, Premier Xi [Jinping] mentioned that he hoped that both parties, the United States and China, could avoid the Thucydides Trap.

What did that mean?

It refers to a book and an article by the well-known political scientist Graham Allison.

In it, he presented a paradigm of international relations. Briefly, it was this: If you have an established power, like ancient Sparta, and it gets worried that there is an ascending power, a rising new neighborhood bully or something, the older power, the established power, will attack it, and there will be a war.

He gave some examples from history. He called it the Thucydides Trap because the historian Thucydides, who was born about 460 BC and died somewhere around 400 or 395 BC, wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War.

At two key places in his first book or chapter, he said that there were various reasons to go to war, but probably the most likely, in his opinion—and he said this in two different places—was that Sparta was afraid of the dominance that was growing throughout the Greek world, and so it staged a preventive war by invading Attica, the country around Athens, in 431.

He used this term that he created called a Thucydides Trap, and then he applied it to some incidents in history. Most importantly, Xi was referencing [Allison’s] book because in the book it said that the United States might do something rash or might prevent.

With all due respect to Graham Allison, who is a very distinguished scholar, this is false.

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A few days ago, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation bestowed one of its storied Bradley Prizes on James Hankins, a sometime professor of history at Harvard University, now at the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, and co-author of The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition.

(Actually, Hankins is the sole author of Volume I of The Golden Thread, which tells the story of the Western tradition from the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC through the Renaissance.

Volume II, which picks up the story with the Reformation, is by the historian Allen Guelzo.)

This is the moment when I note for the record that, being the publisher of these magnificent books at Encounter Books, I have what is called in the trade an “interest.” But don’t take my word for the adjective “magnificent.”

The reception of these books has been nothing short of ecstatic. Perhaps the most searching review is by Spencer Klavan and appears in the current number of The Claremont Review of Books.

Listening to Jim Hankins’s remarks at the Bradley event prompts me to reprise a few thoughts about what we are up to with The Golden Thread.

The phrase names not only these two books but also a larger project that Encounter is undertaking with several partners to change the conversation about—well, I was going to say “about education.”

But really, it is about that vibrant thing that the soporific word “education” designates, namely, opening the treasure chest of the past in order to confront and ultimately to emulate greatness.

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We may have witnessed the most MS NOW moment of all time.

On Monday, MS NOW host Katy Tur moderated a panel in which she discussed recent, supposedly controversial comments by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La.

“What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government, they come from you, our Creator and heavenly father. Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence?” she asked incredulously.

I’m just going to pause here and quote from this obscure line in the Declaration of Independence. And by obscure, I mean one of the most famous lines in the English language.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal… ” maybe Tur never got past that part, “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

So, the concept that God is “above” the Declaration of Independence is… in the Declaration of Independence. God’s law supersedes man’s law. Governments that deprive citizens of rights endowed by their creator without due process are bad governments and are possibly illegitimate. That’s the whole point of the thing, right?

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Few predicted that blaming Israel and the Jews who support it would flare up in the early 21st century—and in America of all places, where there are nearly as many Jews as there are in Israel.

After all, Israel is the only consensual society in the Middle East. It holds regular elections and maintains tripartite judicial, executive, and legislative checks and balances.

Free speech is found in the Middle East only in Israel, where religious apostasy, criticism of one’s own country, gender equity, and tolerance of gays are guaranteed in marked contrast to all its neighbors.

It was once common knowledge that Israel had survived the huge numbers of its enemies because its tiny population was better educated, freer, more adept at Western technology, more tolerant of dissent—and because it enjoyed the goodwill and bipartisan support of the United States.

True, the recent affluence of the Gulf States has presented a thin veneer of Westernism that has fooled many in the new anti-Israel media. But just because Qatar did not censor a celebrity newsman’s broadcast from Doha does not mean Qatar is a free society. After all, no Western journalist would dare schedule a broadcast from Qatar with a Qatari who had condemned the regime for its intolerance or announced his religious apostasy from Islam.

So why and how did millions of Americans begin to express hatred for Israel and, albeit more subtly, the Jews who support it?

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President Donald Trump has been compared to many historical figures, by opponents (who claim he’s another Adolf Hitler) and by boosters (who cite Andrew Jackson or Teddy Roosevelt).

With his blockade of Iran, though, maybe we should start comparing him to Gen. Winfield Scott.

In the mid-19th century,

Scott was America’s preeminent military mind, the architect of victory in the Mexican War and the “Grand Old Man of the Army.” As the Civil War loomed, he developed a plan to defeat the Confederacy with the smallest number of casualties possible.

He called it the Anaconda Plan — and like its namesake it was about applying a squeeze, and squeezing hard, until its object was squeezed to death.

Rather than winning a single decisive battle or a series of major confrontations, Scott wanted to cut the Confederacy in two by seizing control of the Mississippi River, while choking off the South’s foreign trade — upon which it was enormously dependent for both money and materiel — with a naval blockade of its Atlantic and Gulf ports.

Scott’s plan had few takers at the beginning, when enthusiasts on both sides thought the war would be finished in months, with daring cavalry charges and the like.

But when that didn’t happen, the plan became the basis for the Union war strategy — and it worked.

The South was beaten on the battlefield, but its loss came in no small part because it was being economically squeezed on all sides.

Today, Trump is following a similar strategy both at home and abroad.

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